The Trinity 2.0 Arrangement (T2) of the Sraffa Papers is an archival architecture which structures the vast material and provides a road map rendering it conducive for scientific study. Sraffa’s archive is in fact a rich and complex mosaic of inter-connected note-sets. The T2 arrangement organizes Sraffa’s literary remains in two important ways:
Section D3/12 of the Sraffa archive contains notes on Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities consisting of over 7000 mostly handwritten pages in 115 files; to data the T2 arrangement has been made for the material in section D3/12 of the Sraffa Archive that dates from 1927 through 1932.
The T2 arrangment is an organic interface combining the note-set character of the text as first identified in the Bharadwaj-Garegnani (BG) inventory from the mid to late 1980s with the Wren Trinity (WT) catalogue from the early 1990s.
Readers can find here an article written by me, Professor Scott Carter of The University of Tulsa, published (2019) in the online peer-reviewed journal American Review of Political Economy, that describes the history of the Sraffa archive and the development of the Trinity 2.0 arrangement using as an illustration the single file folder D3/12/3: Notes London 1927 (Physical Real Cost, etc.). This was the file that Professor Garegnani subjected to scrutiny in his seminal 2005 Turning Point article. Garegnani’s knowledge of the BG inventory allows him to introduces the first hybrid convention between the BG inventory and the WT catalogue, serving as the prototype for the Trinity 2.0 arrangement.
In terms of meta-file organization, T2 puts the files in chronological order (excepting the first two files which are outliers). This requires a reshuffling of files from the WT catalogue and the breaking-out of 5 of the Bharadwaj-Garegnani files, three BG files from WT.D3/12/10 and two from WT.D3/12/9. This gives a total of 16 T2 files as opposed to the 13 WT files from the period. To keep matters as clear as possible, each file folder will be identified by all three conventions, T2, WT, and BG.
The Trinity 2.0 Arrangement is uses readily available Google technology to construct a navigation schema that allows its users to comprehend and discover Sraffa's literary remains.
The above image shows a timeline for the meta-file arrangement of the material from 1927 to 1932 in D3/12. As the first two files are outliers, included above are the notes Sraffa penned from Summer 1927 to on or around May 1932.
Readers will notice that the two-thirds of this material was written before Sraffa began his lecturing duties in Fall 1928 with his course entitled The Advanced Theory of Value, archived according to WT as D2/4.
The T2 transcriptions for 15 of the 16 files (called Full T2 Transcriptions 1927-32) are at the following link: Full T2 Transcription 1927-32 (15 of 16).
On the links below folks will find the T2 Arrangement that uses simple Google technology; this has the drawback of being the digital equivalent of match sticks and scotch tape; however it has the benefit of being accessible to anyone around the world with access to a computer. And making the material accessible widely the the underlying goal of Digital Sraffa and the Trinity 2.0 Arrangement.
Google slides
The Google slideshows present in on each individual slide the tandem presentation of the digital image on the left hand side (LHS) and a complete transcription on the right hand side (RHS). At the top right corner of the RHS transcriptions are the various archival conventions: the T2 Arrangement, the WT Catalogue, and the BG Inventory.
There are two hyperlinks to the T2 code in the upper right corner of the RHS transcription. The first is on the top line and takes users to the main slideshow itself, and the second is on the second line which takes users to the digital image saved on the main Google drive. The archival convention of the file name accords to T2 but note that work is still being done on this, and eventually each of these images will contain all three conventions in the file name. This will greatly facilitate the burden in downloading of the image. The third and last line has the Wren Trinity catalogue code hyperlinked to the page-specific URL in as the material appears on the Janus portal of the Wren Library website devotes to Sraffa. Note that this too is being updated, and not all of th eWT links are yet made.
Google docs
The Google docs collects the transcriptions and puts them into complete documents, as complete documents for each file and then these complied into a single larger transcribed document. The link for the Full Transcription 1927-32 are also given above. The transcribed Google docs for each individual file are also collected, the links of which appear below. Readers will notice that sometimes there are no transcriptions; this usually is the case when there are graphs and some equations, and as the site progresses into complete fruition this will be attended to as well, along with all the other missing pieces, etc. Indeed we can use peoples' help and crowd-sourse a lot of this; meaning that if and when there are mistakes them please let us know; please address archival matters to the following email: admin@sraffaarchive.org.
Sraffa speaks in the present tense
An important element of the material that people should keep in mind when working through the material is that Sraffa writes in the present tense - he is speaking to us now, about issues in economic science that are not resolved. This is especially important for younger scholars who tire of the poverty and paucity of mainstream economy theory who are looking for new and fresh ways to consider economic theory and importantly, economic policy.
Folks should refer to the Introductory Blog post dated August 3, 2020, two days before Sraffa's 122nd birthday, the occasion upon which the Digital Sraffa site and Trinity 2.0 Arrangement were launched. There we describe how the Trinity 2.0 project was very much informed and inspired by the way Sraffa himself handled the archival material of David Ricardo in the eleven volumes of the Works and Correspondece of David Riccardo. To provide background, folks should read the entry made in 2017 on the earlier Heretical Sraffa blog introducing Sraffa's various comments throughout the Works, directly linked to the HTML version in the wonderful resource that the Online Library of Liberty (OLL) has provided.
What is important for the purposes of the Trinity 2.0 Arrangement in this introductory context is the way Sraffa handled and himself arranged chronologically the Ricardo Correspondence in Works VI - IX. Sraffa describes in the Introductory Comments to Works VI how his differs from previous versions of Ricardo's letters:
The Trinity 2.0 Arrangement is constructed with this same goal in mind, namely to put the reader behind Sraffa's desk and thereby comprehend the material as an organic text.
In each of the files below folks will find links to the T2 slides, the T2 docs, and the link to the file on the WT Janus portal. Introductory videos are pending and in-process as of this writing.
At the link below is a short video that introduces the Digital Sraffa and Trinity 2.0 arrangement for the material from 1927-32.
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